Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 63 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 7-game main slate on this cool and sunny Tuesday morning in San Diego, California.
If you are a new subscriber to our NHL Core Plays, please make sure that you are playing all of the lineups that I post on any given day. NHL is such a highly-variant sport and there is truly no telling which lineup will go off. I do have my favorites each day, but even the lineups that I may not think have massive upside sometimes, in fact, have the upside you need to take down a tournament.
Top Stacks
The Montreal Canadiens have been dominant at home (where they have the best CorsiFor% in the league over the course of the season). Things get even better with a cake matchup against a Florida Panthers team that is playing on back-to-back nights and has allowed a total of 14 (yes, 14) goals against in its last two contests. Load up the Canadiens top line that consists of Phillip Danault, Brendan Gallagher, Tomas Tatar and Shea Weber against the Panthers who have allowed the third-most goals against per game this season.
Since the Ottawa Senators are in play, I am obligated to write-up the team that is playing them because we must have exposure to such team. The squad that gets to shoot against the Senators this evening is a Buffalo Sabres team that is very much in need of an offensive kickstart. Buffalo comes limping into the Canadian Tire Centre having won just a single contest out of its last 10 games. Meanwhile, using smoke and mirrors, Ottawa managed to eek out victories in three of its last five games. Don’t let these wins fool you as the home team is still allowing the most goals against on the most shots against per contest in the NHL. This is a spot where the Sabres top line (Jack Eichel – Conor Sheary – Alexander Nylander) must get healthy so lock them in.
Despite the fact that the Carolina Hurricanes have won two in a row and four of their last five, we are going to attack them with the Washington Capitals that have won six of their last 10 and are on home ice this evening. Yes, I know that the Hurricanes have some of the top puck control numbers this season, but the home team is looking to gear up for a playoff push tonight as the road team does struggle on the road against opposing teams’ first lines. As such, your focus in this game should be Alex Ovechkin – Nicklas Backstrom – Tom Wilson – John Carlson.
Other Notable Stacks
The stacks I wrote about above are the ones that I project to be highly-owned. When I write “highly-owned”, on a 7-game slate that typically means ownership of about 25% in GPPs. The stacks above also tend to be expensive. So, you will need to use some of the below mentioned stacks as fillers or as one-off individual plays to complement your high-priced stacks.
Other stacks that you should have exposure to tonight are: Canucks 2 (Elias Pettersson – Brock Boeser – Sven Baertschi – Alex Edler), Oilers 1 (Leon Draisaitl – Connor McDavid – Zack Kassian), Blue Jackets (Pierre-Luc Dubois – Cam Atkinson – Artemi Panarin).
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There were some questions in the Slack chat over the first month of the season about how to find the lines that I list as my top stacks on the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Cheat Sheet. Head over to either DailyFaceoff.com or LeftWingLock.com to see which skaters are on each of a team’s lines and then build your line stacks. For example, if you see that my top stack of the day is “PIT PP1 / 1”, look at one of the two sites listed above and you will see that the top power play unit of the Pittsburgh Penguins consists of Patric Hornqvist – Evgeni Malkin – Sidney Crosby – Kris Letang – Phil Kessel. The team’s top line features Jake Guentzel – Sidney Crosby – Patric Hornqvist. I decided to leave off the players’ names from the line stacks because of the fact that they may change before the game or after the team’s morning skate (if applicable). Both sites I mentioned are updated regularly and typically accurate. If you’re ever lost, just ask questions in our Slack chat.
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